The BBC taking care to annoy gay men by using a familiar slur for “gay men.”
Noël Coward grew up in poverty and left school at 9. He was queer in a very straight world. At 30 he was the highest-paid writer in the world and a star. This is his inspirational story.
Even if one is onboard with the idea of oppressed groups reclaiming some of the slurs used against them (honestly, this is a contentious topic, and one I personally have no stake in, and so little opinion on that I need to express one way or the other), ‘reclaimers’ invariably assert that the term is still only acceptable use in-group. So yeah, I’ve got no opinion on a black rapper who drops the n-word, or a woman who proudly calls herself a b****, in order to mean she isn’t going to take shit from anyone. I’m still staying the hell away from those words, because in my white, male, straight privileged hands, they are only used as weapons, and will always be weapons, and my peers need to accept that fact.
And yeah, ‘queer’ falls into that category. LGB folks who want to use it, hey, go for it. The rest of us (and yes, that includes ‘translesbians’) have no business using it, and that includes any form of major media outlet.
Time for some cultural history. Not so very long ago, many homosexual people, male and female, in Britain – I do not know about the States – self-described as ‘queer’ and felt comfortable about it. ‘Homosexual’, then erroneously believed by many of us to have originated as a medical term, felt cold and dehumanizing. ‘Queer’ was our own word for ourselves. This was still the case when I first began to ‘come out’, a little over fifty years ago, in my late teens. In those days ‘queer’ was commonly used in its primary meaning of ‘odd, peculiar’, so that it could function as a code word: only those in the know would pick up its covert meaning.
I remember well when the missionaries came from the States and preached Gay Liberation. This was back at the start of the seventies. We were exhorted to stop thinking of ourselves as queer; it was time to come out proudly and call ourselves gay. Most of us fell into line. Quite a bit later some lesbian and gay people began to use queer again, not as a reclaimed slur, but as an act of defiance and a gesture towards our history.
In a further development, ‘queer’ has recently been appropriated as a a suitably vague umbrella term for every special little snowflake who doesn’t want to think of themselves as ‘cis’… [See Wikipedia]
Two examples of ‘queer’ being used as a code word:
i) One of the characters in E. F. Benson’s social comedy novel Miss Mapp (1922) is the painter Irene, who ‘lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’. Benson himself was homosexual.
ii) Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer (1953) is set during the Second World War in a hospital for wounded service men. The central character, Laurie, is homosexual; in one scene he uses the word ‘queer’ when in conversation with another man to find out whether he too is a self-aware homosexual.
I love the Mapp novels along with the Lucia novels. Quaint Irene is very interesting because Benson (no relation alas) never spells it out and yet it’s completely unmistakable.
Freemage, yeah, that. See also: gay men claiming to “reclaim” the term “bitch”, and British/English/Australian blokes using “cunt” as a “not-a-slur-so-shutupabboutit-it’s-friendly” term of address.
As a general rule, safe to assume if a word’s use as a slur is not dependent on YOU PERSONALLY being considered subhuman, best avoided, lest you be seen as – at best – intellectually dull and therefore not worth my time or concern.
NightCrow: A bit of unpleasant context, for comparison’s purposes, from across the pond from the mid-late 70s: In elementary school, during recess, we were a pretty feral bunch. A common ‘game’ was for one person to get a ball, and for everyone else to give chase. If the ball-carrier was successfully cornered, the entire male population of the class would quickly dogpile on him, typically until he wept from lack of breath. He could divest himself of the target by tossing the ball to someone else, who then had to flee the mob’s wrath (the notion of just not catching the ball never seemed to occur to any of us, and the validity of the tactic probably would’ve been denied–a failed catch just would’ve meant you lacked the ability to pass off your status as the designated target). A ball-carrier who managed to be holding it at the end of recess was considered to have ‘won’, for all that was worth.
This bit of pubescent mob violence was given the name “Smear the Queer”.
Also, queer is imprecise in meaning and hence not descriptive. Wasn’t he quite straightforwardly gay?
#4 OB
Depending on the context, I have always taken it to mean either odd or old fashioned. My radar might not be tuned enough to detect sufficiently old circumlocutions for homosexual.
Oxford English Dictionary, editions of 1914 and 1933 (with acknowledgement to the Internet Archive):
Quaint. … Unusual or uncommon in character or appearance, but at the same time having some attractive or agreeable feature, esp., having an old-fashioned prettiness or daintiness.
Here’s the passage where we first meet Irene Coles, in Miss Mapp (1922):
Miss Coles was strolling along in the attire to which Tilling generally had got accustomed, but Miss Mapp never. She had an old wide-awake hat jammed down on her head, a tall collar and stock, a large loose coat, knickerbockers and grey stockings. In her mouth was a cigarette, in her hand she swung the orthodox wicker-basket. …
Irene removed her cigarette from her mouth and did something in the gutter which is usually associated with the floor of third-class smoking carriages. Then her handsome, boyish face, more boyish because her hair was closely clipped, broke into a broad grin.
“Hullo, Mapp!” she said. “Been giving the tradesmen what for on Tuesday morning?”
Miss Mapp found it extremely difficult to bear this obviously insolent form of address without a spasm of rage. Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was[ as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as “quaint Irene,” but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.
Obviously there is nothing of ‘old-fashioned prettiness or daintiness’ in Irene’s appearance and behaviour, so to this extent Miss Mapp is being ironic. But she is certainly ‘unusual … in character or appearance’: in other words, ‘queer’. Miss Mapp is handicapped by needing to be ladylike; she can only hint at what she knows, or at least suspects, about Irene. But her horror when Irene, who paints ‘from the nude’, teasingly asks her to sit for her, is eloquent: ‘Miss Mapp gave a little squeal and bolted into her dressmaker’s.’
I see there are various accounts of that game on the web. Were you aware at that age that ‘queer’ was a slang term for homosexual, or was ‘smear the queer’ just a catchy rhyme?
I have just watched the Noel Coward documentary, which is first rate, beautifully put together, with some fantastic footage. It gives Coward’s homosexuality the proper weight – that he had to keep it concealed but did manage long term relationships.
The word queer only appears once – Coward asked an accompanist if he he had ever been “queer” (pronounced in his clipped English “quer”) and the accompanist said no – and Coward said “pity, very amusing”.
Even if one is onboard with the idea of oppressed groups reclaiming some of the slurs used against them (honestly, this is a contentious topic, and one I personally have no stake in, and so little opinion on that I need to express one way or the other), ‘reclaimers’ invariably assert that the term is still only acceptable use in-group. So yeah, I’ve got no opinion on a black rapper who drops the n-word, or a woman who proudly calls herself a b****, in order to mean she isn’t going to take shit from anyone. I’m still staying the hell away from those words, because in my white, male, straight privileged hands, they are only used as weapons, and will always be weapons, and my peers need to accept that fact.
And yeah, ‘queer’ falls into that category. LGB folks who want to use it, hey, go for it. The rest of us (and yes, that includes ‘translesbians’) have no business using it, and that includes any form of major media outlet.
Time for some cultural history. Not so very long ago, many homosexual people, male and female, in Britain – I do not know about the States – self-described as ‘queer’ and felt comfortable about it. ‘Homosexual’, then erroneously believed by many of us to have originated as a medical term, felt cold and dehumanizing. ‘Queer’ was our own word for ourselves. This was still the case when I first began to ‘come out’, a little over fifty years ago, in my late teens. In those days ‘queer’ was commonly used in its primary meaning of ‘odd, peculiar’, so that it could function as a code word: only those in the know would pick up its covert meaning.
I remember well when the missionaries came from the States and preached Gay Liberation. This was back at the start of the seventies. We were exhorted to stop thinking of ourselves as queer; it was time to come out proudly and call ourselves gay. Most of us fell into line. Quite a bit later some lesbian and gay people began to use queer again, not as a reclaimed slur, but as an act of defiance and a gesture towards our history.
In a further development, ‘queer’ has recently been appropriated as a a suitably vague umbrella term for every special little snowflake who doesn’t want to think of themselves as ‘cis’… [See Wikipedia]
Two examples of ‘queer’ being used as a code word:
i) One of the characters in E. F. Benson’s social comedy novel Miss Mapp (1922) is the painter Irene, who ‘lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’. Benson himself was homosexual.
ii) Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer (1953) is set during the Second World War in a hospital for wounded service men. The central character, Laurie, is homosexual; in one scene he uses the word ‘queer’ when in conversation with another man to find out whether he too is a self-aware homosexual.
I love the Mapp novels along with the Lucia novels. Quaint Irene is very interesting because Benson (no relation alas) never spells it out and yet it’s completely unmistakable.
I’ve always assumed the “Quaint” in “Quaint Irene” was Tilling’s way of saying “gay” (or “queer”). Quaint–>eccentric–>odd–>queer–>lelelesbian.
Freemage, yeah, that. See also: gay men claiming to “reclaim” the term “bitch”, and British/English/Australian blokes using “cunt” as a “not-a-slur-so-shutupabboutit-it’s-friendly” term of address.
As a general rule, safe to assume if a word’s use as a slur is not dependent on YOU PERSONALLY being considered subhuman, best avoided, lest you be seen as – at best – intellectually dull and therefore not worth my time or concern.
NightCrow: A bit of unpleasant context, for comparison’s purposes, from across the pond from the mid-late 70s: In elementary school, during recess, we were a pretty feral bunch. A common ‘game’ was for one person to get a ball, and for everyone else to give chase. If the ball-carrier was successfully cornered, the entire male population of the class would quickly dogpile on him, typically until he wept from lack of breath. He could divest himself of the target by tossing the ball to someone else, who then had to flee the mob’s wrath (the notion of just not catching the ball never seemed to occur to any of us, and the validity of the tactic probably would’ve been denied–a failed catch just would’ve meant you lacked the ability to pass off your status as the designated target). A ball-carrier who managed to be holding it at the end of recess was considered to have ‘won’, for all that was worth.
This bit of pubescent mob violence was given the name “Smear the Queer”.
#0 OP
Also, queer is imprecise in meaning and hence not descriptive. Wasn’t he quite straightforwardly gay?
#4 OB
Depending on the context, I have always taken it to mean either odd or old fashioned. My radar might not be tuned enough to detect sufficiently old circumlocutions for homosexual.
Ophelia @ #3, #4
Another Mapp and Lucia fan. Great.
On ‘quaint’:
Oxford English Dictionary, editions of 1914 and 1933 (with acknowledgement to the Internet Archive):
Here’s the passage where we first meet Irene Coles, in Miss Mapp (1922):
(Text taken from the <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25919/pg25919-images.html"Project Gutenberg edition)
Obviously there is nothing of ‘old-fashioned prettiness or daintiness’ in Irene’s appearance and behaviour, so to this extent Miss Mapp is being ironic. But she is certainly ‘unusual … in character or appearance’: in other words, ‘queer’. Miss Mapp is handicapped by needing to be ladylike; she can only hint at what she knows, or at least suspects, about Irene. But her horror when Irene, who paints ‘from the nude’, teasingly asks her to sit for her, is eloquent: ‘Miss Mapp gave a little squeal and bolted into her dressmaker’s.’
Freemage @ #6
I see there are various accounts of that game on the web. Were you aware at that age that ‘queer’ was a slang term for homosexual, or was ‘smear the queer’ just a catchy rhyme?
I have just watched the Noel Coward documentary, which is first rate, beautifully put together, with some fantastic footage. It gives Coward’s homosexuality the proper weight – that he had to keep it concealed but did manage long term relationships.
The word queer only appears once – Coward asked an accompanist if he he had ever been “queer” (pronounced in his clipped English “quer”) and the accompanist said no – and Coward said “pity, very amusing”.